


Notes on the Nature of Brotherhood

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-11
Updated: 2005-12-11
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:25:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scenes from the lives of two brothers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Notes on the Nature of Brotherhood

**Author's Note:**

> Written for thecolourclear in the Toby Ziegler ficathon, 2005.

_Brüder, über'm Sternenzelt  
 Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen_  
 Brothers, above the arch of stars  
A loving father surely dwells.  
 -- Friedrich Schiller, 'An die Freude' (Ode to Joy)

*

His brother David looks like their father. It is this, perhaps more than any other thing, that Toby cannot forgive him. David's face is as their father's was when their father was a young man. The collection of four faded, twice-folded photographs of Julie Ziegler bear this out, as far as Toby can remember anyway; he hasn't been able to look at them since he was eight. When he and David were little kids and went to see the one paternal relative still available to them, their father's ancient cousin Yosef who had made it to America God knows how, the resemblance was always remarked on. Toby saw, not jealous of the attention but not pleased either, that David's was the cheek pinched and pulled.

"He's your double, Julie!" Yosef would say in German that was as halting as his few words of English. "_Doppelganger_!"

Then he would look at Toby and pause, hold his hand out towards Toby's hair as if to ruffle it, but never quite make it. Uncle Yosef (as they called him) would smile at him but never touch him, and the old man's face would twitch and falter, the tip of his tongue worrying a rough spot on his lip. Toby had always been glad to be free of his attention, since he had never wanted those grey-looking fingers to touch him. What had worried him more was the expression in his father's eyes and the way his hands had always mirrored Uncle Yosef's - patting the air around Toby's shoulder, but never quite making it to contact.

*

At school, for the first three years, Toby is lonely as well as bored. He wonders how the other kids can be so stupid, so ignorant, and goes home to his family, showing off his first test scores and five-sentence compositions. It becomes a ritual, and not one which Toby relishes. But he sits, listens to his mother's voice tripping over the sentences that sounded so different in his head, before he put them down on the paper. She likes to read them, and he hasn't yet learnt how to say no to his mother. When Toby is eight years old he brings home a composition which he is proud of, one he can't imagine himself improving on. His hands are shaking as he sits down at the table, so he makes them fists, tight and pale.

His eldest sister Hana laughs and mocks the style of this essay, as she has most of the others which his mother has insisted, since he first brought one home, on reading out in their small, dim kitchen. This is not unexpected, and Toby doesn't mind. He watches Hana turn back to the eight-page epic of a letter which he knows, but their parents do not, is to her boyfriend. His other sister, Rachel, sits across from him at the table and smiles, not saying a word. His brother David, three years younger and still shaky with the alphabet, sits beside him and rests his head against Toby's arm with his eyes closed and his legs kicking. David is a great consumer of his prose and this is a particularly exciting essay for him, featuring his favourite topic. It is about the moon.

But it is his father's opinion which Toby wants, so that's who he watches, with his chin propped in his open hand. Julie Ziegler sits at the head of the scratched but spotless kitchen table and smokes his pipe, looking out of the window into the gathering night and moonless sky. When his mother's voice stops, Toby looks down at the table and waits.

"Toby," his father's voice says, from what seems a long way away, "This is wonderful, son - wonderful! You'll be a great writer someday, yes?"

Toby shrugs and his father smiles at him, then laughs, shaking his head, "My Toby - a great man someday." Toby can't make out what his tone of voice means; the subtleties escape him, and so his father's laugh slips through him, chilling and too memorable. The first is followed by another, from behind Hana's hand.

"I don't think so," she says, looking up from her ninth sheet of paper. "I think Toby'll have to be the guy at the bagel stand the way he's going - no-one could work with him!"

"Hana," their mother says, "He's only eight, just a boy still." She touches Toby's hands, fisted together on the table-top, "It was very lovely, Toby." He tries to smile, but can't help thinking to himself, _you can't say 'very lovely', Ma_ ...

"Well, I wouldn't work with him," Hana says.

"I wouldn't work with you!" Toby says, raising his voice and his gaze. He stares at Hana, silently daring her to say something that would allow him to bring up the addressee of her letter. She stares back at him and sighs, arching an eyebrow and tucking her hair behind her ear; a minor annoyance, like her brother. Toby is just about to open his mouth as his father says,

"Toby, enough," his voice closer now as he rises from the table. "Don't talk to your sister that way."

"Pa - "

"No, Toby. That's enough."

Toby looks back down at the table, running his fingers against the wood, wondering if his nails will be able to make a impression along the grain.

His dad's hand passes over his hair, a slight touch as he walks out of the kitchen. Toby can't tell if it is meant as praise, or comfort, or a further reprimand. He looks up just as his father bends to kiss David's head, and he catches a trace smell of tobacco, thin smoke. Then he turns his head.

Their mother stands too, she puts a hand on Toby's back and one on David's shoulder. "Time for bed now, boys. Come on." David jumps down from his chair, and pulls on Toby's sleeve. Toby makes a face at him, then gets down too. They say goodnight, they go to their beds.

They have not, none of them have, yet stumbled upon the great secret of their family. And the next morning, their father has gone.

*

It is Toby who cannot forgive, and David who cannot understand where his father went. Toby listens to him weeping at night, filling the tiny bedroom that they share with undercurrents of sound which settle around Toby while he sleeps, becoming what he listens for in his brother's voice the next morning. Toby never says anything in the night; David back is always turned on him, and so it is private and not spoken of between them. But one night, Toby sighs and whispers his brother's name in the dark:

"David?"

He hears David's crying subside into three stuttered gulps and a sniff, too loud in the dark.

"Come on."

The moonlight shines around David's head as he pulls his blankets down, making him into a little silhouette in the bed across from Toby. He stares at Toby, still sniffling and breathing through his mouth. "What?" he says, his voice sullen.

Toby lifts his blankets up and open, and smiles. "Come on."

"But you don't care," David says, his face covered in frown-lines that the light has made dark blue.

"Maybe I do, though."

"You don't," David says, very soft. Toby watches him turn back to his pillow, sees the moonlight pick out David's lower lip which is pouting, shiny with tears.

"Maybe I miss him," Toby says, his voice soft now too, and digging his fingers tight into his blanket.

"Yeah?"

"Yes."

"I do, too."

"I know."

"You won't tell that I was ... you know?"

"No."

"Can I come in with you?"

"That's what I was asking."

"Oh ... okay."

Toby holds David, stroking his back and trying not to listen to his breathing. David pushes his face deep into Toby's shoulder and his cheek is hot, still damp, against Toby's neck. Toby runs his fingers through David's hair, thick and tangled and tries not to think, tries to sleep. But sleep is not forthcoming. He runs his own lies back through his mind, wondering if he sounds like him now, wondering if, when he is grown-up, it will be him who looks like their father and David who will escape. He hugs David a little harder, and watches the moon descending.

*

That year, David starts coming to school with him. They walk with Toby slightly in front, on the road side. Occasionally he lets his left foot slip off the curb and into the gutter, making his shoes wet as he treads through the leaf mulch for treasure. Toby keeps his eyes in the gutter; they find more pennies there. He keeps the quarters, fewer and farther between, in his fist and hands the pennies to David, who carries the paper tubes from the bank in the expansive pockets of a coat that was Toby's two years ago. David fits the pennies into the tubes as they walk, keeping his fingers slow and steady. Toby watches him as they walk.

By the time Toby is ten it has become clear that there is more than one prodigy in the Ziegler household. Toby stays silent as David reports straight As and their mother cuddles his brother's report card to her chest as she would David, if he'd let her. Hana catches his eye over the kitchen table and mimes sticking her fingers down her throat, then smiles. Toby smiles back at her. See, he thinks, we don't even need you.

David keeps the rolls of pennies in a little cardboard box by his bed. They multiply slowly, underneath the lid which always goes on when neither brother is in the room. Toby doesn't remember when they started the practice, nor when they began to be secretive about it. But he makes sure David never goes out of the house without a roll of pennies in his pocket - it's a sure way to do a little damage on your way down.

*

He goes to David's first graduation, thereby relieving himself - in his mind - of any of the many further social obligations which he feels sure will arise from his brother's academic career. The Cornell campus irritates him; so packed with students and their families that he can hardly get his breath. He is twenty-four and the ceremony of commencement is not new to him, but he is still self-conscious and feels more comfortable under the shadow of the Tower, where the grass is cold and still damp from the dew, than he can out in the sun. He can just see them, all of them - they've come out from the crowd to find him. The high sunlight disappears into the square of David's mortarboard and misses his face, which is completely shadowed. His girlfriend, soon to be his wife, is holding him around the waist and laughing, giddy. Their mother stands, frail but determined, all in white, beside him. His sisters are trying to get the children to stand still long enough to get some pictures taken.

Toby looks up to the summit of the Tower, and finds he misses New York. He stares up at the sky, until he hears someone calling his name.

David keeps the astronaut thing a secret from Toby. He is near the end of his MSc, fooling with amphibians all day in cold labs before Toby gets to know, and not from his brother. He hears it from Rachel, who heard it at Thanksgiving dinner from Hana's daughter, Ruth. Apparently Uncle David wants, even though he is now a full-grown man and not a boy of Ruth's age, to see the moon from a different vantage point than everyone else. Toby frowns when he gets this news, over the phone from Rachel.

"I mean," she says, her voice too high, too excited. "Can you believe that, Toby? An astronaut!"

"I guess there is some outside chance that he wouldn't be a genius at that too?"

"Toby," she says, her voice dropping into disappointment. "Why can't you be excited for him?"

"I'm excited," he says, "I'm ecstatic that my brother wants to risk his life in space."

"Toby, it's not like that and you know it."

"Well, what is it like then? It's space travel, Rachel! It's not a trip down the street to the drugstore!"

"Don't be this way when you see him, Toby."

"Okay."

"Your opinion means a lot to him. If you can't be happy for him, at least don't be like this."

"I said okay, Rachel."

"You know I'll check."

"Yes, I know."

*

"When did you want to be an astronaut? What makes you think you could be an astronaut?"

David shrugs at him and smiles, through his plastic goggles. "A payload specialist. It's not so hard, actually."

"It's not so hard?"

"No. I mean, harder than you could do, but that's not pushing the envelope, really."

"Thank you."

David's voice doesn't change when he says, "I spoke to Dad about it. He likes the idea."

"What do you care what he thinks?" Toby says, his own voice low and level.

"I think it'd make him ... proud, maybe."

"David, you have one postgraduate degree - at a 4.0 - and a Fullbright scholarship, should you want it, for the PhD. The PhD, David. So I think maybe you don't have to fly to the moon in order to make our father proud. Which, by the way, I wouldn't recommend you wasted any time or effort on if you were the guy picking up leaves in Prospect Park."

"Not to the moon, Toby."

"Whatever. Just ... just don't do this for him."

"I'm not doing it for anyone, Toby. I'm doing it for science."

"Are you really my brother? There wasn't some mix up at the hospital?"

"It's important. What you do is important, and I want to do that too. For science."

"What I do is supremely unimportant. And you're just fine the way you are."

"Except for not being your actual brother?"

"I would have thought that would cheer you. Anyway, I have to go. You can go be with your newts now."

He's at the lab door by the time David says, in a voice quiet but shattering: "You should go see him, Toby. He's always talking about you, asking me things."

"I'm happy with that arrangement."

"Toby ... "

"No," he says, pausing at the door before he turns back to his brother. "I'll see you, David."

"Okay," his brother says. Toby catches David's sigh as he goes through the door but doesn't bother turning back; this is an argument they have had too many times before.

*

He is the elder brother, but somehow it's okay that, even now, he is the screw-up and David is the genius with a wife and two kids and an all-access pass to Columbia. He sits in the dark in his office, which is sixty-three feet from the Oval, and remembers this, whilst waiting for a phonecall; as though as a punishment.

The first time David went up, Toby sat in the gloom of the nearest bar and drank his way, steady and sure, through a bottle of Jack. It was, at that time, not much of a break from his usual routine. Tonight, he sits in his office, trying to raise enough energy to lift his hand and turn off the lamp. He cannot, and even if the lamp were off, the white glow of the moon - full and unfavouring - would still fall on the text of Sam's answer on Cuba. He closes his eyes for a second, then reaches into his left desk drawer. Underneath two folders and a spare pad is a small, twice-folded sheet of paper. Toby takes it out, unfolds it, and lays it on top of Sam's unreasonably neat script. He sighs, and reads the paper through:

_Code 40379: NASA STS: Columbia OV-102  
_____________________________________________

_Person AT-PayloadS 2: David Ziegler_

_Mission D3/ Prep begins: 0400 (Zulu) 03/04/1994_

....

 

He has others, but this is the one he keeps, small and secret, in his desk or in his wallet. He's not superstitious, except when he is, but tonight he would rather have this piece of paper in his hand than in his drawer. So he sits, rubbing his thumb over the corner of the schedule, following the ring of the coffee stain with his finger. He can't help turning and pulling the blinds open, trying to see past the moon and the stars and into the dark, wondering where he is. He can't hear anything but the blank whisper of the sky and his own heartbeat, and so it takes two tries for the President of the United States to get him to turn around.

*

"David?"

  "Toby?" His brother's voice seems distant over the phone, all the two-hundred and fifty miles from DC to New York. "So, what's the matter, does the Oval need a favour from NASA?"  

"It's so great that you're still doing this cabaret schtick."  

"Yeah, okay."  

"You okay?"  

"Sure. You?"  

"Yeah, you know. Holidays, hell."

  David laughs, "Yes, I'm dimly aware. You might try actually showing up for the family edition of seasonal hell there, Toby."  

Toby holds his breath a second before he says, "I saw Dad."  

"Yeah, I know. I saw him too."  

"I figured."  

"So, how did it go?" David asks, his voice soft.

  "A little like if the people who organise the Holiday season had started doing house calls."  

His brother laughs, hard and long. "He said you were ... welcoming."  

"I'll bet," Toby mutters.  

"It was a good thing to do, Toby."  

"You gonna tell me I'm a good son now?"  

"Ah, no. No, I'm not."  

"Suck-up."  

"Screw-up."  

"Fuck you."  

"Which is why we never invite you over."  

"It has nothing to do with you knowing I wouldn't show."  

"No, nothing to do with that. Night, Toby."  

"Night. Take care."

  "You too."


End file.
